It is often of great interest to determine whether two cellular components are in close proximity to one another. For instance, there are several existing methods for determining proteins with the tendency to form complexes, such as Yeast 2-hybrid and mass spectroscopy. These methods require separate experiments for each protein of interest and cannot be used to probe other cellular components such as nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) and small molecules. In addition, they do not take advantage of the plummeting cost of sequencing.
Further, current methods to provide intracellular localization of individual proteins and/or enzymes only provides partial information. These studies have no relevance as to whether these proteins are actively participating in an intracellular biochemical function, or merely being transported from one intracellular region to another. Further, these methods do not provide information regarding hundreds if not thousands of biochemical functions that are occurring simultaneously.
Clearly what is needed are compositions and methods that are amenable to high throughput technology that can accurately provide real time information regarding the interactions between potentially all intracellular components at the same time.